Kaspersky Labs, World-Renowned Internet Security software providers have launched a new tool today called Krab Krawler which examines every post on Twitter and analyses the linked webpages for malware.

Although Twitter microblogging service is limited with 140 characters, but the malware problem arises with malicious short URLs that keeps on lurking on Twitter public posts.

According to Kaspersky’s statistics, almost one in every 500 web addresses posted on Twitter lead to sites hosting malware . The spread of malware is aided by the popular use of shortened URLs on Twitter which tend to hide the real website address from users before they click on a link preventing them from knowing where they are going.

About 26 percent of the total posts contain URLs, and many of those lead to spam sites that are marketing products or services and aren’t considered malware, according to Raiu or Kaspersky. Tens of thousands of different accounts are posting spam links, most likely from accounts created by bots, he said. The most frequent URLs posted lead to online dating sites, he added

Unlike AVG LinkScanner,that relies on the information provided by users and famous search engines, Krab Krawl is a community tool that analyzes URLs in real time ,this tool fetches and extracts URLs that appear in Twitter’s public timeline and feeds them into a database for analysis. A set of modules scan each website being linked to by the URL, looking for malware.

Although Twitter uses it’s own filtering system to block malware, but it’s not effective because the filter seems to work only on URLs shortened by Bit.ly service and there 200+ URL shorteners around the web

Krab Krawler works on top of Twitter’s filtering system.The extra layer is useful because of malware’s propensity to undergo code changes to avoid detection.But do make sure you have a standard virus scanner running!

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